After some eight years of being a subscriber, I did not renew my subscription to The Guardian Weekly this year. I won’t go into why; suffice it to say I miss my weekly shot of news. Mostly though, I miss Nature Watch.
This column can be summed up as a meditation written by a country diarist posted in a remote corner of Shropshire or Norfolk or the North York Moors, recording the habits of birds and the seasonal changes of native plants. While the rest of the hubristic world is flying off the handle like Phaeton in the carriage, the diarists observe the elements, the flora and fauna of England’s wilds, shrouded in nature’s hush, almost outside time: they are walkers not charioteers, listeners not babblers. As far as I know The Guardian is the only newspaper to give us this aperçu of the natural world; at first glance it seems anachronistic and whimsical, but upon closer inspection, we see that this window onto the moors is subtly political and that the fancifulness operates both as a shifter of sensibilities (from news about our condition to a profound reflection on it) and as a way of approaching the concerns of conservationism without flattening them into a pat agenda.
I used to clip these missives and paste them into my notebook. Here is one on lapwings, written by Mark Cocker:
“We assume that the bird itself is filled with some of the feelings of joy that its performance inspires. I don’t believe that or, at least, I feel we can never know what it feels. Yet there is in its behaviour a kind of love, but rooted in being perfectly itself. It is our encounter with this absoluteness in the natural world that heals us but that, as a society, we have yet to value truly or find means to harness.”
Pure Lao Tseu, really.
As a family we try to get out to the forest on the weekend, usually on Sundays. We’ve been doing this since my son was about two-years-old; at first we carried him in a backpack, but he began walking alongside us sooner than we thought he would. Like me, it turns out he’s a regular mountain goat. A friend of mine who works with children and whose wise advice in matters of mothering I’ve always been attentive to, used to tell me that walking in the forest was not a child-oriented activity. She was right, it isn’t. But nor is going to mass, or to temple or to the mosque; there are some things we do with our children because they are important to us and if their entertainment value flails in a permanent recession, so be it: the transmission of values or of love and a passion is what counts. We’ve always taken our son to the forest with us because it is in nature that we are able to be most “perfectly” ourselves somehow. We walk, not because we need something to do, but because walking is meditation in motion and it brings us into the landscape the way the eye pulls a viewer into an absorbing painting; it enables a communion to take place.
Fortunately for us, Paris is surrounded by spectacular forests, once the hunting grounds of Kings. Most often we go to the Forest of Ermenonville because it is closest to home, a 45 minute drive, but my favorite is the Fontainebleau forest, particularly around Barbizon where nearly alpine landscapes of pines, heather and mossy rocks alternate with woods of beech and oak trees. I stumbled upon this site, which gives instructions on how to get there by train from Paris: http://parisweekender.com/2011/07/barbizon-the-forest-of-fontainebleau/
Enjoy!
A path in the Ermenonville Forest
I always bring a plastic bag to pick up trash people with no manners leave in the forest. I went to Montessori school. Old habits die hard.
An abbey we sometimes visit after our walk. There is a beautiful rose garden in back and in front, a good humour truck that sells homemade sorbets.
A pumpkin patch at the Château of Villandry in the Loire Valley — the countryside gets a French manicure.